Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 3 2018

Exodus 20.1-17

1 Corinthians 1.18-25

John 2:13-22

We assume that the Ten Commandments are very familiar to everyone, but I wonder how much that is true today.

And, yet, we almost don’t need to learn them at all. Much of what they say is self-evident. The Ten Commandments are about how to be human, addressed universally to all humanity. It’s striking how little religion there is in them. True, the first three commandments relate to God, but there is nothing about ritual or sacrifice, nothing about how to carry out acts of worship. The only “religion” in the Commandments is about remembering that we are created, and who created us.

Jewish commentators often point to how a passage opens and closes as a key to understand its meaning. The Ten Commandments open with “I am the Lord your God… you shall have no other gods before me” and close with “you shall not covet… anything that belongs to your neighbour”. Read in this way, we see that they are about desire. Desire the Lord your God, and not other gods. Desire your neighbour’s good, and not your neighbour’s things.

Follow the ten commandments, and you will desire rightly. Which means that you will live rightly. You will be offering God true worship and living truly as humanity is meant to live. Because we are part of creation, worship and life are two sides of the same coin.

The desires that destroy bring us into rivalry. Desires for what other people have, which lead to conflict and violence. Desires for other gods, because other gods are not our creator and source of life. Other gods, if they exist at all, are only things, such as forces of nature, parts of creation. To worship them is to seek life where it cannot be found, for all things have their being only from the one Creator, whom alone we must worship.

Really the Ten Commandments are very simple. And yet they are such a challenge. Simply to hear them read, we are reminded of all the ways in which humanity collectively, and we ourselves, are constantly short-circuited by our wrongful desires. We know this is how we should live, and yet we fail.

Except for one human being. Jesus today enters the Temple in Jerusalem, and what he does there is almost an interpretation, an enactment, of the Ten Commandments: right worship, right living. The Temple was a physical embodiment of Israel’s worship, a place for prayer and sacrifice. Moreover, it was meant for all people. The inner part of the temple was reserved for Jews, and was where the rituals specifically given to the Jewish people were observed.

But the far larger outer part was the “Court of the Gentiles”, where anyone could worship. This corresponds to the ten commandments addressed to all humanity. It was a reminder that, for all people, right worship and right living went together, and a reminder to Israel of its universal vocation, to bring salvation to all people. It was to stand open in invitation to all.

But what Jesus actually found there was very different: money changers, working on a hefty commission, and licensed by the priests, because they would not allow idolatrous Roman coins with the emperor’s image into the Temple treasury. And sellers of animals for the sacrifices that were offered in the inner Temple – sacrifices that were partly about breaking the commandments. Offerings for sin and atonement showed in a figurative way the cost of putting right the harm done by our disordered desires.

But all this had taken over the space meant for the Gentiles. Jesus saw these things as an obstacle to true worship. All nations should be coming to worship their one true God. All nations should be living in harmony with creation and one another, as set out in the Ten Commandments. The Temple should be a sign of that. But instead it had become an obstacle to right worship and right living. It was keeping people away from God.

His driving out of the money changers and the animals for sacrifice was a prophetic sign. Jesus himself is the one who will restore true worship and right living. As the Eternal Son of the Father, the worship he offers in the Holy Trinity is infinite, perfect, beyond anything we can comprehend. As a man, united with our human nature, that worship becomes our worship, offered by Jesus as our priest and representative.

‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ He said this of the temple that was his body. The Temple built with stones is over. The new temple is Jesus himself. He is where humanity meets God, with no obstacles in between.

And in three days he will raise it up. The cleansing of the temple is a sign of his forthcoming death and resurrection. The cross culminates the life of Jesus which was one perfect act of worship in obedience to the Father. It is his perfect sacrifice, freely offered as both priest and victim, that reconciles all humanity with God.

This is foolishness, according to the wisdom of the world, as St Paul says today. But is it not the world that is mad? This perfect total love of God and of humanity is the single most sane and completely human thing that has ever been shown to us, and it was shown us by Jesus.

And his resurrection enables all to live in the fullness of life with God and one another that the Gospels call eternal life. Jesus lives the commandments, fulfils the commandments, and opens to all who believe in him the true and eternal life to which they point.

In Jesus, there is no obstacle between humanity and God. He has opened the way to all. Woe betide the Church, then, if we put any obstacles in his way. If we do so we are no longer living as the Church. And yet that can happen. Our living in Christ is a process of growth and transformation, as we are changed into his image by grace. But the old untransformed humanity can still be evident. So the Church must always be on the guard against the rigid legalism that tells people they are not worthy, that they do not meet the standards of our rules. Against the self-obsession that can obscure the Gospel. Against the laziness that says we don’t need to witness and share our faith. Put nothing in the way of Jesus!

But also in our own lives, in the temple of our hearts. What obstacles are there that may prevent us from fully coming to Jesus? What disordered desires and attachments have a hold on us, turning us away from desiring God alone as our supreme good, and our neighbour’s good under God?

Lent is a time of conversion, a season for self-examination and repentance. A time for cleansing the temple of our hearts. For the true temple of our hearts is Jesus himself, who desires to dwell in us by faith. The true worship of that temple is his life, death and resurrection, the pattern of which he desires to imprint on our lives as we are changed into him.

Let nothing get in the way of Jesus, in the Church, in our hearts. Let all come to him, for he desires to draw all people to himself, you, and me, and everybody, all sorts and conditions, whatever life has been, whatever our burdens and sorrows and sins. For he is zealous for the house of God that he desires to build in our Church and in our hearts, and there is no-one he will turn away.

Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 2 2018

Genesis 17.1-7,15-16

Romans 4.13-25

Mark 8.31-38

Alice laughed: “There's no use trying,” she said; “one can't believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Today we are looking at faith, and we might wonder, is that what faith is? Believing six impossible things before breakfast?

For a surer guide to faith than “Alice in Wonderland”, we can turn to the sacred scriptures. Today we read about Abraham, Sarah and Peter, people who are held up to us as examples of faith, and yet their journey of faith involved struggle, getting things wrong, learning to let go and trust God.

God made a promise to Abraham that he would be the ancestor of many nations. And, as the letter to the Romans says today, he believed, and this was reckoned to him as righteousness. He believed in spite of the fact that Sarah could not have children and he was very old.

But what Romans passes over is that Abraham and Sarah didn’t know how God was going to fulfil his promise of children, and set about doing things their own way. They hit upon the idea that Abraham would have a child with Sarah’s slave Hagar, who would give birth on Sarah’s lap, so that the child would count as her own.

Leaving aside the extraordinary things that were considered acceptable in some Biblical marriages, this wasn’t what God had in mind. A child, Ishmael, was born. God came to Abraham again and said, yes, I know you’ve had this child, and I’ll bless him for your sake, but that wasn’t what I meant. And then Sarah herself conceived. Isaac was born, the child of God’s promise, the father of Jacob, who became Israel.

Abraham and Sarah believed God, but acted on their own mistaken ideas of how God’s purposes would come about. Nevertheless, God kept his word and did things the way he intended, anyway. Faith is a journey. We can make false starts and go the wrong way, but God guides those who believe to the end he intends for them. Faith means trusting God, not trying to secure everything for ourselves.

It was the same for Peter, in today’s gospel reading. Just before today’s extract Peter has made the great confession of faith to Jesus, “you are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God”. And Jesus says that this faith has come to him as a gift from the Father. Peter has not worked this out on his own, God has revealed it to him. Peter’s faith is authentic and true.

Now the Messiah is the person who will save God’s people. But Peter, in common with most faithful Jewish people of the time, had his own idea of how God’s purposes would be fulfilled. They thought the Messiah would be a military leader who would drive the occupying Romans out of their land, a political liberator. The Messiah was certainly not someone who would be defeated and killed.

And yet, Jesus says to Peter, this is how it has to be. “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed.”

To Peter this seems like madness. Perhaps he thought it was a test. Perhaps he thought Jesus was saying, “when this happens to me, are you going to be there for me? Will you fight for me?” So Peter says to Jesus, no, don’t worry, we won’t let that happen to you.

Peter has real faith, but he has his own idea about how God’s purposes will be fulfilled. He wants to organise God’s programme for him. But his ideas are not God’s ideas.

This earns for Peter a really harsh rebuke, “get behind me, Satan!”. And yet Peter needs to hear that. Peter must learn that the way of violent opposition, the way he wants to organise things, that he thinks is God’s way, is actually the way of Satan. If you oppose the Romans with their own methods, you will just end up perpetuating the oppressive world system of Satan. The mission of Jesus is to save us from that.

So, Peter, the would-be warrior against Rome, has to learn to take up his cross, the Roman instrument of oppression and death, he has to learn to lose his life for the sake of Jesus and the gospel.

Part of the journey of faith, for Peter, Abraham and Sarah, for us, is about discovering that God is in charge and we are not. About discovering all the ways in which we are wrong about God. Letting go of our ambitious ego that wants to organise everything. The Kingdom of God is God’s project, not ours.

For Peter the way of the cross was no metaphor. John chapter 21 tells us that he would die for his faith. According to tradition he crucified upside down in Rome, the hunted leader of a small group of Christians. And yet his witness and death, in weakness and failure, laid the foundations for the Roman church of centuries to come.

Five centuries after Peter that same Roman church sent a small group of anxious and fearful monks to evangelise a distant, cold, wet and savage country they had vaguely heard of, called Britain. Their mission wasn’t terribly effective in their own day. One of them, Mellitus, became the first bishop of a small Saxon fishing port called London. His cathedral was probably a wooden hut. He wasn’t there long, as the pagan sons of the local king drove him into exile.

Yet, on the site of Mellitus’ wooden hut, today there stands St Paul’s Cathedral. And we are here, brothers and sisters, in one of hundreds of parishes in London, because of Mellitus’ mission that began in weakness and apparent failure. The Saxon fishing port of London has grown to a great global city. But it is a city of many faiths and worldviews. In such a context the Church can seem small, ineffective, weak. But our task is not to compete with the prevailing worldviews. Our task is not to use the methods of the empire against the empire. The task of the church is not even to save itself. Our task is to bear faithful witness to Jesus, and leave the rest to him.

In our own lives, too, we try to organise God’s purposes for us. We might have a particular skill and liking for, say, golf course management. Obviously, then, that’s what God wants me to do with my life. Well, wait and see what God wants to do with your life. There is no promise in the Gospel that we will do what we want, or have success, or fame, or wealth, or family life, or good reputation. There is simply an invitation to follow Jesus in the way of the cross. At every moment of our lives, faith leads us on a path that we do not know, but God does.

So do not be afraid. For us, as for Abraham, Sarah and Peter, following in God’s way, however contradictory it seems, is the way of salvation, life and peace. Let go of the ego and its ambitions, all the ways we want to organise God’s Kingdom, and follow Jesus. Faith tells us that we can trust God, even when we get things wrong, even when the path we follow is dark and difficult, the way of the cross. God knows what he is doing, and will do it.

Sermon at Parish Mass 1st Sunday of Lent 2018

Genesis 9.8-17

1 Peter 3.18-22

Mark 1.9-15

Many years ago, when I worked for a London university, I was a union health and safety representative. Health and safety reps have, by law, certain powers to use on behalf of the workforce, such as the right to enter and inspect any part of the workplace without notice, and even to instruct people to stop work and leave. A power only to be used in case of emergency, but it was there if needed. A representative acts with authority on behalf of other people.

Our readings from the Bible today have people acting in representative ways. The tale of Noah and the flood belongs to the genre of storytelling called myth. This does not mean it is untrue. In fact the story of a great flood occurs in several middle eastern cultures and may well contain a memory of an ancient disaster. But that’s not really the point of the Biblical story. Myth tells us the truth about ourselves and the world, not through journalistic reporting, but through epic saga, great heroes and symbolic acts.

The way the Bible tells the story, the flood is about salvation rather than destruction. The underlying message is that God does not want to cancel the project of creation, even when it has gone horribly wrong. He cleanses the earth through a flood, and saves the only righteous people he can find so that they can re-found the human race and restore creation. We are to forget modern individualism. The people on the ark are representatives of the whole human race, custodians of creation and its future.

And so the story concludes with God’s covenant, made with those representative humans who are given the task of beginning again. The story leaves us with a new understanding of God who, within the horizons of this story, appears to renounce violence. This sets the stage in the end for a Messiah, a new representative human, who, to save the world, will suffer violence rather than inflict it.

The first letter of Peter makes this link, in the passage we heard this morning. Jesus is the one who suffered for sins, but as the righteous for the unrighteous. Noah and the flood is a story of salvation, “a few, that is, eight people, were saved through water”. Moreover, the deeper meaning of this story is that it prefigures baptism, “[which] now saves you - not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ”.

The symbolic refounding of the human race in the story of Noah is fulfilled in the eternal refounding of the human race through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is the new Adam, the one righteous person who is saved from the deepest flood of all, the waters of death, to become the head of a redeemed human race in a restored creation. God makes a new covenant with Jesus, through his death and resurrection, on behalf of all humanity.

This is shown through his own baptism in the river Jordan, with which today’s gospel reading opens. John is baptising for repentance, and the crowds come to him confessing their sins. Jesus joins them, though he alone is without sin and has no need of repentance. He identifies himself with the mass of sinful humanity, so that he can reconcile sinful humanity with God. As St Paul says in 2 Corinthians, God “made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”.

When Jesus identified himself with humanity in his baptism, God was revealed as Trinity: the Spirit descended on the Son as the voice of the Father was heard. Those who believe in Jesus are identified with him, through our baptism, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Our baptism flows from the baptism of Jesus. In him all humanity is washed clean, and begins again. In him, we are adopted as children of God. In him, we receive the Holy Spirit and the Father recognizes us as his beloved children.

And so Jesus has to experience the whole of what it means to be human. The Spirit, the Father’s gift, drives Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. The Spirit of God does this. Why? Because from now on Jesus is identified with all humanity, and all humanity is tempted. But, apart from Jesus, all humanity fails. We have fallen into sin. Jesus does not. The new Adam will not fail the way the first one did. He is victorious over temptation, and in him we can be victorious too. But only in him. Jesus was tempted, not only as the Son of God, but as the Head of the Church, and we are his members. If we reply on our own strength against temptation we will fail. But faith in Jesus gives us access to the victory he has won for us.

Forty days. The length of time that the rain fell on the earth in the story of Noah. The time of sweeping everything clean and beginning again. Jesus must endure that time of testing. He must prove the truth of the vocation he has received from the Father. But, once he has, he can proclaim, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news”. And that proclamation comes with power, because it flows from his tested, authentic, identity as the Son of God.

The Church too keeps a season of forty days every year, in imitation of the temptation and fast of Jesus in the desert. Originally this was the season of preparation for those who were to be baptised at Easter. 

But in time all Christians came to observe Lent. Knowing that we drift away from the grace of baptism, this became a season of self-examination, repentance and renewal, of beginning again. A time to rediscover our identity in Christ. A time to wash clean the rust and dirt of sin that accumulates in our souls. In baptism we received once for all a wellspring of eternal life, our rebirth in the image of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit. But that life-giving source can become choked, clogged up, ineffective, through sin and neglect.

Lent is a time for renewal, a time to discover once more the Lord who is always waiting to forgive us as soon as we turn back to him. It’s is a time for renewal in faith, faith in Jesus who was tempted and suffered for us, so that we, in him, can know forgiveness of sins and victory over temptation. It is a time for deeper examination of conscience, to renew our baptismal promises to renounce evil and follow Christ.

Many Christians also use the ministry of reconciliation, confession and absolution by a priest, as part of the discipline of this time. In the modern Common Worship rites, the ministry of reconciliation is subtitled “recovering baptism”. That is exactly what it is. Baptism cannot be repeated, but the ministry of absolution, with the authority that Christ has given to the Church, has the same effect for sins after baptism as baptism has for sins committed before: a deep clean, a washing away of the detritus of the past, a fresh start.

In this season of Lent we are recalled to the greatness of what God has done for us. Adopted in Christ by faith and the grace of baptism, we are joined with him in his death and resurrection, made children of God, heirs of eternal life. It is time to recover that grace, and live it in our lives once more. It is time to live Lent. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”